8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service • Hacker News Board

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#291

Post by SCAQTony » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 6:54 PM UTC

The law plainly defines free speech and intent.

From "Justia": "...A conspiracy occurs when two or more people agree to commit an illegal act and take some step toward its completion. Conspiracy is an inchoate crime because it does not require that the illegal act actually has been completed. ..."

Elements of a conspiracy here; https://www.justia.com/criminal/offenses/inchoate-crimes/con...

Conspiracy and encouragement to harm others by seeking agreement online by providing detailed plans, strategies, and the execution therein, as witnessed in some hastily written screeds and manifestos by shooters and terrorists, appears to cross that line.

Is 8Chan guilty as an active contributor to the horror that has occurred? More than plausible, but its liability albeit civil of punishable has seemingly not yet been defined.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#292

Post by lone_haxx0r » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 6:54 PM UTC

LargeWu wrote: post #120

Can any free speech absolutists explain to me the legitimate public interest that is served by allowing terrorist breeding grounds like 8chan to continue to operate?

Moral principles don't need to be justified by the "legitimate public interest" (in the short run), otherwise we would kill all babies that we predict will become criminals, even thought they've done nothing wrong yet.

I think laws should be fair and consistent. Censorship is inconsistent with freedom and justice. Additionally, the interpretation of messages is subjective.

If laws are inconsistent and arbitrary (and consequently, unfair), then you might as well throw moral principles out the window altogether and become a fascist, a white supremacist, etc.

The only way to have a just society, in my opinion, is when freedom of the individual is the base of all laws, and those laws are logical and consistent with each other.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#293

Post by DrDimension » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 6:54 PM UTC

castis wrote: post #268

DrDimension wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A private company must act as public infrastructure once it becomes a de facto monopoly.

edit: nah

The regulation applied to electric and telephone companies in the US...

How can people be this ignorant of recent history?

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#294

Post by Bud » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 6:55 PM UTC

tombert wrote: post #50

nilkn wrote: post #4

I've generally been on the free speech side of this debate, as some of my previous comments on HN will show. With 8chan, I legitimately don't know what my opinion is. I've read it before, and I spent a few hours reading it this weekend, and it's beyond clear to me that it absolutely had the potential to radicalize shooters and terrorists. I'm not referring to the simple use of racial or ethnic slurs -- of course this…

I think I'm on the same boat as you on this one; I tend to have a pretty libertarian view on free speech, but lately the bizarre rise of hyper-radical idiots on places like 8chan (and even YouTube to a lesser extent) has really made me question these things. It's very easy to shout the mantra of "Free speech!!! OMG!!!" but we gain nothing by acting like there aren't natural consequences to it. By having a liberal fre…

"Free speech" protections DO NOT APPLY to a private company deciding whether to provide internet services to something like 8chan.

Period.

I continue to be surprised at the level to which people misunderstand this.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#295

Post by octosphere » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 6:55 PM UTC

Title is misleading. When I read "go dark" I think of a service doing the clever thing and burrowing itself in the darkweb where it's nearly impossible to take down (unless it gets DDOSed of course).

But even DDOS'ing can be mitigated by hardening your server, and doing rudimentary things like rate limiting and filtering out bots with captchas. Things are made even easier by using a tricked out NGINX[0] server or even Varnish cache[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nginx

[1] https://www.varnish-cache.org/

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#296

Post by chrisco255 » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 6:55 PM UTC

tepidandroid wrote: post #139

My opinion is that freedom of speech is a fine ideal to strive for, but it relies on having a stable society with some minimum level of education (moral and philosophical too, not just the technical kind). It requires people who are able to fully parse the implications of what they are hearing to make sound and rational judgements on the rejection of an idea or the embrace of it. It creates a moral duty for the peopl…

So the solution then, should be to socialize people in such a way that such views do get challenged.

The alternatives, where we have gatekeepers like Google and Facebook entirely deciding what is permissible speech, is too far to the other extreme.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#297

Post by fyrabanks » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 6:55 PM UTC

mieseratte wrote: post #211

CydeWeys wrote: post #76

We wouldn't tolerate the existence of an Islamist site that glorified and helped perpetrate mass incidents of terror against our society. What 8chan is doing is exactly the same, minus the Islamist part, yet there's hypocrisy in how they're treated vs e.g. the social media wing of ISIS. These people are trying to kill as many of us as possible. In no way should society accept it. It's simple societal self-defense. Ro…

> We wouldn't tolerate the existence of an Islamist site that glorified and helped perpetrate mass incidents of terror against our society. I certainly would tolerate those sites. Free speech arguments aside, you can't kill the hydra, but you can severely degrade intelligence operations watching that hydra. Best case the bad guys all end up on sites already being surveilled, worst case they slip under the radar. We h…

Exactly this. These sort of folk started congregating on 8chan when they got pushed out of 4chan. I certainly don't condone mass shootings, white supremacists, etc., but if you think denying 8chan hosting is going to solve this problem, you are sorely mistaken. All it does is force these people into more concentrated forums where there is less push back and opposing views to their radical ideas. Ultimately, it forces them into corners of the internet that are harder for outside groups to locate and monitor for potential threats.

I'll be quite honest, I don't know what a "good" solution here is, but I really don't think this is it.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#298

Post by Karunamon » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 6:55 PM UTC

idlewords wrote: post #200

romaaeterna wrote: post #174

If we're going to have internet censorship, I don't want it to be a backroom thing. It needs to be transparent, auditable, appealable, with bright line rules and due process guarantees. It's unfortunate if we need to live with some level of censorship. But I don't accept it being carried out in back rooms by unaccountable companies operating hand-in-hand with illegal DDoS attacks. Put it out there in the open, and le…

Speaking as someone who runs a public site with the discretion to ban accounts, no thanks. Due process means people will game your policies. We've had arbitrary internet censorship by site operators since day 1 and it works pretty well.

>Due process means people will game your policies.

And? If your policies are liable to being "gamed", then either your policies or your enforcement is insufficient. And I say this with a pretty good deal of forum moderation experience. When you find something that your objectively defined rules miss, you update your rules appropriately and continue on.

Life as a mod is about a million times easier, for both you and your users, when you minimize the amount of judgment calls on edge cases that have to be made.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#299

Post by smt88 » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 6:55 PM UTC

DrDimension wrote: post #266

boramalper wrote: post #182

What people (seemingly) fail to realise is that neither Cloudflare is the Internet nor Voxility is a public infrastructure. They are private enterprises which are free to act in however they want with regards to the service they provide as laid out in their contract. That is the danger of centralisation; when they remove their service, it feels as if your rights has been violated because (a) you have been so used to…

A private company must act as public infrastructure once it becomes a de facto monopoly.

None of the companies discontinuing relationships with 8chan are monopolies. In some cases they're just the last in their category to finally drop 8chan.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#300

Post by Smithalicious » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 6:56 PM UTC

jordigh wrote: post #243

Smithalicious wrote: post #215

This once again goes to show that you can do nothing illegal and still be virtually locked out of the internet. The viewpoint that "it's okay to kick 8chan off the internet" is not consistent with the viewpoint that "the internet should be neutral infrastructure". Take from that what you will. People are doing the "yada yada not entitled to a platform" thing, but the distinction between free speech and having a platf…

It's fine, we can get rid of the bad. It's not impossible to tell good and bad apart, so we don't need to keep the bad if we also want the good. The slopes are not that slippery. Germany isn't a dystopian hell-hole because they banned Nazism.

Good and bad is not a binary, it's a spectrum. If you put the cutoff for what is allowed very close to the limit of hwat you think is "good" (i.e. you try to ban everything you would consider "bad"), there will inevitably be people with different viewpoints who can bring up a convincing argument that your cutoff also bans some good tihngs. We need a "buffer" of things generally considered "bad" but not too bad, so that we can ensure that good things really are allowed; allowing good things is more important than banning bad things. That is a key principle of having a free society. Of course, things wihch are obviously really very bad should be banned. Good news: they already are! Hate speech is banned in virtually every country I can think of. I'm explicitly not arguing against legal action against hate speech here; I'm arguing against private ocmpanies banning things which are not illegal.

Leaving all that aside, even if you think all bad things should be banned, I do not think that Cloudflare of all things should be the arbiter of right and wrong.